Creative Conversations: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

AYANNA LLOYD BANWO (b. 1980) is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago currently living in London. Her debut novel When We Were Birds was the 2023 winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, and the American Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize, the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award, the McKitterick Prize and named one of the UK Observer’s Best Debuts and The Economist’s Best Books of 2022. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe and PREE, among others and shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She is the 2023 winner of the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award and is currently at work on her second novel.

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